Today I read a novel called Nobody Gets the Girl. It’s by James Maxey, who went to Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp one of the years before I did.
It’s a fun and imaginative book. Comic-book hero stuff. I basically read it straight through.
Since comic books used to have letters pages where they would publish letters from fans nitpicking details, James asked for readers to send letters of that type so he could post them on the website. I wrote one. Click the link below to access it.
To the Author:I can’t be certain, because this involves the Uncertainty Principle, but it looks like you blew it with regard to Schrodinger’s cat. If the cat can observe its own existence and thereby collapse the quantum-mechanical wave function of a closed system of which it is a part, then the cat will always turn out to be alive.
From that, it follows that only an outside observer can collapse a wave function. You must have known this, because you have a character who performs the function of outside observer for the re-creation of the universe. Since you know this, and I know this, why doesn’t Dr. Know know?
–Eric Stone
Eagle Mountain, UT
Ooh! Now I have to write a story called “The Cat That Observed Itself.”